


Eternal Vigil

by DGCatAniSiri



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen, Refuse Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-18
Updated: 2014-09-18
Packaged: 2018-02-17 20:08:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2321732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DGCatAniSiri/pseuds/DGCatAniSiri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fifty thousand years later...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eternal Vigil

Elsen Tu’wana wiped her brow with her upper left hand. She was not entirely sure why she persisted in going on archeological digs to these barren worlds, but something compelled her to keep at it, even though the rewards seemed to only be getting dirt in places she didn’t know she had. 

Right now, her dig had taken her to a planet that had suffered some kind of devastating cataclysm some fifty thousand years prior, give or take. She didn’t know what had been the cause. That was, in fact, part of the reason that she was on this dig, along with others from Hezri’kai University. Granted, as just a research assistant, she knew it was unlikely that she would actually discover any new insights into the species who had preceded the corai in the galaxy, but, as Professor Haok was quick to point out, that didn’t excuse her from her assignment.

She recognized that this could be a long assignment, as Professor Haok had that look in his eyes as he’d discussed this dig. She wasn’t exactly looking forward to spending the next three ayons of her life here, but it was an opportunity that she couldn’t pass up, not if she really expected to get anywhere in this field of study. 

Torva Liack approached her dig site. “Elsen,” he said, leaning forward and resting his upper arms on the railing around her corner of the site, flashing her a smile. “Hey, I managed to find something I think you’d like to see.”

Elsen glared at him. “Torva, I swear, if you and Kotar have cooked up a prank, I swear...” Both Torva and one of his bond-mates, Kotar, were rather infamous among the dig crew to be willing to indulge in utterly immature and juvenile jokes at the expense of the others in the crew.

But before she could finish the threat, Torva’s lower hands waved. “Elsen, I’m serious about this. You REALLY want to see this.”

With a sigh, Elsen looked over her particular patch of dirt. Recognizing that she really didn’t appear to be on to something, that there really wasn’t anything holding her to this spot, she pulled herself up. “You had better not be grabbing my leg with this, Torva.”

“Trust me, Elsen.”

“That never leads to anything good...” Despite her protest, Elsen followed Torva back over to his corner of the site, where Kotar was carefully wiping away dirt. That alone was a sign to Elsen that this absolutely was not a prank. She’d never seen Kotar be that careful with anything.

He looked up at their approach. “There you are!”

With the potential importance of this, given Kotar’s seriousness, Elsen had a sudden sense of concern. “Should we locate Professor Hoak?” she asked, now concerned. If they had discovered something of value, then they should have the Professor on hand in the event that it was important.

Torva gave an emphatic wave of his lower arms. “Hoak would just try to take all the credit for this, and we’d barely end up with a footnote mentioning us.”

Elsen placed her lower hands on her hip and the fans on either side of her face flared. “What exactly do you think you’ve found, Kotar?” She didn’t disagree with his assessment of Hoak’s glory-hounding ability, but she found it hard to believe that this was a discovery that reached the level where he would want to steal the credit for it. 

He motioned to his discovery. She was not impressed. “It’s a box.”

“It’s got an active electronic signature, keeping it in hibernation mode.”

That was impressive, but it didn’t necessarily mean that this was a major find. “So some asrilia were wandering around this planet a few hundred years ago and left some of their tech behind.” The asrilia had been one of the more dominant species in the galaxy, up until a disease had struck them a few centuries back and cut their numbers down to a point that they’d turned to isolation as they attempted to repopulate, leaving the galactic landscape pretty much open for races like the corai and the nevan.

Now, Torva waved his lower hands. “No, Elsen, this thing... It’s older than the asrilia. We think that it’s from before that. From a dead race. And it’s still active.”

Elsen was skeptical, but she couldn’t deny the possibility. It explained why Torva and Kotar had come to find her. Her particular area of study was ancient technology, so if anyone was going to activate this thing, it was likely to be her more than anyone. 

She sighed, bowing to the inevitable. “All right. But if this kills me, expect me to rise from the dead and strangle the both of you.” She readied herself and gently shoved Kotar aside, taking the tool out of his hands and working at it herself. It appeared that the tech was small enough that she could hold it in two hands. That was a good sign, from Elsen’s perspective. Smaller size meant less parts that could be broken off.

“I hope one of you is familiar in ancient languages. I know I never could get the hang of salarian,” she muttered. She knew that Torva had some familiarity with a handful of the dominant languages of dead species, but she doubted that he had enough that he’d catch more than a few words of any kind of message she might activate, and that was assuming that it was a language that he could recognize in the first place. 

It took her several minutes, but then she managed to activate it. “Here we are...” she said as a series of lights on the side lit up. Among them was something that, if Elsen were to guess, was a power indicator. The device was very low on power, which told her that this was probably not the place to try and get the device to perform its functions. 

She became aware of Torva and Kotar arguing behind her, discussing the prestige and fame from finding working tech from an extinct species, especially if it was one of the species that made up what were known for simplicity’s sake as ‘the precursors,’ used to refer to the collection of asari, salarian, turian, human, elcor, volus, hanar, krogan, and quarian species that had once lived and worked together in the galaxy prior to the evolution of the corai and the other species now roaming the stars. Elsen was too busy examining the device to give them more than an ear or remind them that they needed to actually verify that this worked before they could claim any accolades for the discovery. Which did leave her with an important matter to deal with...

After a rather thorough examination, even if it was limited to merely a visual one, she came to a decision. “Okay, I’m pulling rank here,” she said as she stood up, clearly intending to take the device somewhere where they could recharge it.

“’Rank’? We’re all students here!” Kotar exclaimed. He seemed offended more at the idea that she was claiming authority than her idea of getting the device out of there. 

She waved off his comments with her upper arms, not paying his concerns any mind. “This is about out of power. If we want to have anyone believe that this actually is what we think it is, we need to get it to a recharge station. Otherwise, we’ll only have a hunk of metal to show for all of this. If there’s any information on this, we need to give it a boost.”

Kotar didn’t have a response to that, allowing Elsen to place the device in her bag. She swiftly made her way to the exit of the site, Torva and Kotar trailing behind her. She clocked out, saying that she was going on a break, and didn’t wait to hear if they did the same. 

Returning to her room in the dormitories, she found a connector wire and tried to locate an appropriate hook up.

“You really think that’ll work? It’s based on entirely different technology than ours,” Torva asked.

She knew that was an issue, but she attempted to console herself with the thought that this device appeared to be some kind of data and information storage device. No one would leave one of them behind without leaving some method of adapting to alternate technologies. As she examined the device further, she noted that it seemed to share many of the basic components and even overall design as a lot of modern technology. It stood to reason, given how much of corai technology was based on precursor tech. So something should work, even if it took some finagling. 

It took her twenty minutes, but she managed to find a proper port, buried under about fifty thousand years’ worth of dirt and whatever else had accumulated on top of it. “I have it. Give it a few minutes, we can activate it.”

The device began to beep. “Or it will activate itself,” Torva said.

Clearing her throat, Elsen looked back to the device, trying to act as if this was all part of her plan. “Right. Or it will activate itself.” She hadn’t been expecting that to happen. The design of the device hadn’t indicated it had features like that. What else might she have missed?

It looked like she’d get the chance to figure out. In a small indentation in the center of the device, a holographic bubble appeared. It had what seemed to be a facsimile of a center eye that took in the surroundings. Then it began making noises, part static and part what Elsen’s ears wanted to call gibberish, but she recognized that it was one of the precursor languages. She looked to Torva, as if issuing a challenge – ‘translate that.’

Torva approached the device, listening close. “Hm... I THINK it’s speaking in an asari dialect from the Last Era... Wait, I think there was a smattering of human-Standard in there.” He shook his head. “It’s almost like whoever programmed this threw together every dominant language at once.”

“Maybe it’s cycling through the languages of the time to see if there’s anything we’ll recognize,” Kotar suggested. Elsen had to agree, though she didn’t really want to say so out loud. 

A thought occurred to her. “Well, don’t just stand there. If you can pick up any specific terms, see if there’s a match for them here.” If they had a word or two that they could offer to give the translation program a baseline to start from, it’d be able to have a start in translating to corai-Standard. 

“Such as?”

“Does it matter? Something that we can recognize as being fairly basic design – a stylus, a wheel, a table, something!” As she considered it, she had to figure that bombarding the program with their language probably was equally helpful. “It’s got to be something that doesn’t have a lot of variation between the races we know of, give it the best chance of being understood as that particular item.” She had a sudden thought that maybe the device was interfacing with the computer that the charging cable was connected to, in which case it was likely already working towards translation. Maybe if she kept speaking... “Torva, speaking some human-standard, or some asari. Then repeat in Standard.” 

Mercifully, Torva got what she was getting at without a need for her to explain, and started offering some basic sentences of corai-Standard. The hologram, having stopped repeating its message in the alien languages, turned to him, the shell surrounding its ‘eye’ rotating several times over as it considered.

After a couple of minutes, the hologram flickered. Then it turned to Elsen. “Greetings. My name is Glyph. I do not have a record of your species in my databanks. May I inquire as to your names?”

It took a few moments for Elsen to register the words, impressed just that they’d managed to get the hologram speaking Standard, not focused on what it was saying. The projection seemed to register her as the leader of the group. “I’m Elsen Tu’wana. These are my... associates, Torva Ha’zar and Kotar Po’dan.” ‘Associates’ sounded more official than classmates, at any rate. “We’re members of the corai. Who... programed you?”

“My original programming was developed and designed by Jormangund Technology. Later modifications were made by an individual only known to me as Operative Kechlu. Many of these modifications were enhanced or replaced by Doctor Liara T’Soni.” There was a pause as the hologram’s shell rotated again. “I have examined the database connected to my data core. According to the star charts, it has been approximately fifty thousand years since Doctor T’Soni had my data core placed in deep storage. There is a message that she wished to have passed on to you. May I play it for you?”

They nodded – they all wanted to hear this. The hologram – Glyph – dissolved and reformed as an asari, one who looked remarkably young to Elsen’s admittedly untrained eye. She had a haggard look to her, as if she had gone without sleep too many nights, and had an unbearable weight pressing upon her. “If you’re hearing this, then there is still hope. Hope that you can avoid the same mistakes we made. We fought the Reapers, but we failed to stop them. We did everything we could. We built the Crucible, but it didn’t work. We fought as a united galaxy, but it wasn’t enough. I only hope the information in this capsule is enough to help you before it’s too late. My name is Doctor Liara T’Soni. Herein lies the recounting of our war with the Reapers.”

The message spoke of a race of machines, hiding out in dark space, who invaded the galaxy every fifty thousand years, wiping out organic life, and using it to create new Reapers. They used the Citadel to shut down the Mass Relays. They were indeed responsible for the relays, for designing them and putting them in place, in order to force organic life down a certain technological path so that they would be crippled when they arrived. 

Some of the images that accompanied Doctor T’Soni’s message made Elsen’s stomach twist. These Reapers were horrific. And Doctor T’Soni had led with the fact that they hadn’t been stopped.

Then came the tale of Commander Shepard. The human who made a difference. Shepard stopped one Reaper when it tried to open the Relay at the Citadel. Then Shepard kicked the politicians’ asses into shape to get them to actually do something. They built a device, the Crucible. It was meant to stop the Reapers. But it seemed it didn’t work right. Whatever they did during T’Soni and Shepard’s cycle, they didn’t stop them.

As the message that Doctor T’Soni had left concluded, Elsen felt a new sense of purpose – to honor the legacy that had been entrusted to them. She looked to Torva and Kotar, and they seemed to share her sense of resolve.

Finally, the image of Doctor T’Soni returned. “Learn from us. Our victories and our defeats are here. The plans for the Crucible are within this archive. You have all the information we could accumulate on the Reapers, and, hopefully with this, you now have the two resources we were most in need of: evidence of the Reapers and time to prepare. I hope we have given you the key to the victory we could not achieve.” She gave a sad smile and her image faded out. 

After a moment, Glyph reappeared. “Although my databank is on reserve power at the moment, you have managed to restore enough power at this point in time that I may resume playback of Doctor T’Soni’s message or call up further information from within my archives at your discretion. Is there something specific that you wish to view?”

It took Elsen a moment to realize that Glyph was speaking to her, as well as Torva and Kotar looking to her for guidance. That meant that she had only one real choice.

She turned to Torva and Kotar. “One of you, go get Professor Hoak, or anyone with any authority. They need to see this, Start getting people prepared.” She turned back to Glyph. “Show me everything.”


End file.
